Invoice Ninja

The demo is very fast, I just click a button and I'm in the middle of creating an invoice in a blink of an eye and it even produces the PDF right away. Good job.

I didn't find the pricing information anywhere on the site, however. Even after I clicked Sign Up there was no mention of how much it costs or if it's free, so I went back to the front page searching for that information and didn't find it there either.

EDIT: I noticed the box telling it's 100% free now that I had missed when I arrived at the site as I just quickly scanned it and then clicked the Invoice Now button. How are you planning to monetize it? Why should I believe it will always be free?

jffry• 12 years ago

It's FOSS [1], and the version they host says "FREE" all over the homepage.

[1] https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja

trebor• 12 years ago

Um, did you miss the yellow block on the left side of the front page? It says...

    100% FREE, ALWAYS

    Invoicing with no monthly fee, because you have enough bills already! Free, now and
    forever! Quality invoicing to build your business and get paid.

There are references to "Free" all over the front page.

nobodysfool• 12 years ago

Well, this is one product that you can say the developers are NOT dogfooding.

photoGrant• 12 years ago

This is fantastic! I have one piece of feedback / improvement.

With the 'due date' field have an automatic +30 days / +60 days / + 90 days option.

rjv• 12 years ago

Love that this is open source and developed with Laravel. Great job!

matthewmacleod• 12 years ago

I really like this, obviously a lot of attention to usability.

Minor niggle: the invoice redraws a lot when it doesn't have to, e.g. changing focus without actually modifying any fields. That's a bit flickery and distracting.

peteacc• 12 years ago

Great idea, small bug in switching currencies. When I change the theme of an invoice it defaults back to USD and does not revert back to the currency set in the preferences.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

....I really don't want to try another invoicing app. There's already dozens, everything from heavy PayPal, to Intuit Network, to light Harvest...

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

So don't?

bdcravens• 12 years ago

I believe the idea is feedback that invoicing is a flooded market, like bug/issue trackers.

hillelcoren6• 12 years ago

Hi, thanks for all the great feedback (I'm the developer of the app).

@matthewmacleod That's a good suggestion, we'll work on it.

@lnanek2 Yes, but we're free :)

@ville, Our first concern is to perfect the application, making money will come later.

@peteacc. I’ll need to look into it, thanks for catching it.

@photoGrant If you set the payment terms for the client it will automatically set the due date for you.

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

I'm actually curious at which difficulties you ran into when creating the app without authentication (have been thinking about this myself, just didn't create it yet)

vidarh2• 12 years ago

Love the inline PDF preview, and overall it's quite clean.

But this is very US centric. But then again, one of my previous jobs existed only because the European subsidiary of my employer did not trust the 50 person strong US billing team to handle European invoicing in a legal way (so we built and operated our own billing system...) - billing/invoicing is tricky to internationalise right.

If you want to consider making it more generic:

Apart from allowing specifying replacement translated text for fields (for many countries this alone makes it impossible to legally use in its current form), a minimum would be changing decimal point/comma (many countries reverse use of comma and decimal point, for example) and grouping.

Also, this doesn't look like it can generate legal invoices for most European countries even disregarding currency, as most European countries have various text that is legally required for a document to be considered an invoice. For starters, the senders name, registered address and registration number (if a company) is required in most instances, and a VAT registration number (if VAT registered).

You can solve that most easily by adding fields for senders/issuers address details to put on the top of the invoice, and a free form text field as a footer, as this varies country by country.

If the invoice includes VAT on line items, there are also usually a legal requirement to sum up the VAT total for the invoice, which would be separate from any other taxes or duties, so you might also want to consider breaking out the different types of tax in your totals. (never mind that there are also rounding issues where specific ways to round are often legally required; in general you ought to be ok for most countries if you add together the unrounded line item tax values and then round, rather than summing up the rounded values - I haven't looked to see what you currently do).

hillelcoren6• 12 years ago

Thank you for the excellent feedback.

German, Italian and French developers have offered to help translate the site and we're working on redoing how line item taxes are grouped. You can track these issues on GitHub:

https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/31 https://github.com/hillelcoren/invoice-ninja/issues/29

There's definitely still work remaining but the more eyes we get looking at it the better we can make it. Please join our Facebook page and keep talking to us.

https://www.facebook.com/invoiceninja

Thanks again!!

simzen85• 12 years ago

Actually this app allows you to enter your company details and then its detail will be placed at the top of the invoice (like you suggested)

In the demo you can't see that because you didn't enter your company details

tommmmmm• 12 years ago

@ville, Our first concern is to perfect the application, making money will come later.

That doesn't sound consistent with the "100% FREE, ALWAYS" banner.

By charging money from the get-go, you'll attract more serious clients, and you won't scare people away when you eventually spring costs on them.

shadowwolf007• 12 years ago

The columns don't really line up will in the invoice and website in iOS7 chrome. The description in the invoice bleeds in to the second row. Same with my account in the top navigation/menu bar.

Otherwise really cool - I will probably use this even though I'm a little less than thrilled over the name honestly.

nfoz• 12 years ago

If there's one thing I can say about my invoicing app, it's that it's not cool enough.

gog2• 12 years ago

It's broken in Firefox, FF just starts downloading random named PDFs and those downloads never finish.

Chrome displays the PDF inline correctly.

Shizka• 12 years ago

It works fine for me in FF. It might be due to the PDF reader you've selected for FF?

gog2• 12 years ago

I think you are right, I opted to download PDFs, not to view them inline.

viame• 12 years ago

This is great! Will test it shortly and probably use it as my main invoicing app. What are some future plans for this?

okwme• 12 years ago

support for other currencies?

hillelcoren6• 12 years ago

You can set the currency for the client which will update the invoice. Hope this works for you.

sotirisk• 12 years ago

I have yet to find an invoice app that supports Greek characters :(

hillelcoren6• 12 years ago

We're working on it, we're waiting on https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF/issues/12

diegocr• 12 years ago

We at the jsPDF Team will be pleased if you help us fixing that issue, rather than just waiting for it to be fixed.

Corrado• 12 years ago

Try Invoice Machine (http://invoicemachine.com/). I don't know if they support Greek characters or not, but they are a small Swedish team so they are definitely internationalized.

amalag• 12 years ago

The reason I really like Freshbooks is their API. I use it to create invoices regularly.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

We use the API to enter invoice payments from a Stripe-based payment site we set up for our clients... it's definitely convenient.

Of course, we also use the web UI for consultancy time tracking and a couple types of invoice generation, so I'm fond of those features as well.

RankingMember• 12 years ago

This is awesomely simple and well-designed.

izolate• 12 years ago

Guess what? You can now preorder .ninja TLDs and be invoice.ninja!

davidjgraph• 12 years ago

"About us" should really be.... about you, not some strange mix of "features" and "technology".

Given the number short-lived web apps that appear and disappear, the about us page is becoming one of the most important. Any "about us" that doesn't mention people is an immediate close for me.

It doesn't matter if you're a one-man band, put up a picture and work out what details of your life so far will cause people to trust you.

_cbb1• 12 years ago

I actually agree to this. Gaining the trust of the user is pretty critical now a days.

The question I ask my self when I visit a web app is "Why should I give you my information and what will you do with it?

phillmv• 12 years ago

I immediately distrust all startups that don't have a team page with real human beings on it.

hillelcoren6• 12 years ago

This is good feedback, thank you!

Expect an "About the Invoice Ninja Team" page soon.

For now... here's a link to my blog http://hillelcoren.com/. I've been building apps for a while now and stand 100% behind anything I create. This project is team affair though.

I realize trust is earned and I hope we're given the chance to earn it.

Edit: added 'to' (grammar mistakes kill me)

InvoiceNinja5• 12 years ago

As Hillel mentioned we're revamping the static pages ASAP. AND we have a content to assist with typos:)

jedahan• 12 years ago

An extra space at the end of the email address field errors out with 'please provide a valid email address'.

Could you trim that field before validating?

wikwocket• 12 years ago

Cool, reminds me of invoiceomatic.io, which has a 'robot' theme.

I look forward to invoicepirate.com (invoicing for piracy), invoicezombie.com (invoicing for reanimating dead projects), and invoicedinosaur.com (invoicing for ancient legacy projects that should be extinct).

pauletienney• 12 years ago

IMHO about branding: maybe "we" should stop this ninja thing. Edit : "we" stands for "general dev community" not "invoice ninja team"

kirbyk• 12 years ago

Your site has downloaded 25 invoice pdf's to my computer automatically. Not functional.

crad• 12 years ago

@hillelcoren would be nice to get a BCC of invoice emails. As is, I do not know how the payment integration presents itself.

Service is otherwise easy to use and looks nice.

pjbrunet• 12 years ago

"100% FREE, ALWAYS" What's the catch? How are they going to make money? Harvest invoice data? Really the only reason I use Freshbooks is for the 50-cent Paypal invoices but I first create an actual PDF invoice in OpenOffice.

shin_lao• 12 years ago

I agree with you. Invoicing is pretty sensitive, I need to feel that the service is going to stay for a while and will not back-stab me somehow.

InvoiceNinja5• 12 years ago

Thanks for your comment! We will not "harvest invoice data", rather in the near future we'll be offering more advanced payment gateway options for those who want to move off PayPal.

brandon2722• 12 years ago

You should charge something for this. Even if you charged $10/year, it at least gives the impression that there is a contract and agreement in place that you will maintain the service and protect and provide the service. I have no interest, personally, in entering a bunch of invoice data in a service that might get shut down in a year after the developers lose interest in maintaining something that they lose money on.

InvoiceNinja5• 12 years ago

Hi Brandon! Email is also free, Facebook is free, waze, twitter, etc... We will NOT be charging a monthly or annual fee for InvoiceNinja.com Email us to discuss: contact@invoiceninja.com

brandon2722• 12 years ago

Nothing is free. E-mail is either provided by your ISP (which you pay for) or ads are displayed alongside the e-mail messages. Facebook publishes ads. Twitter publishes ads.

Will you be publishing ads on invoices? What is your plan to have the service be sustainable into the future?

dspillett• 12 years ago

So the service is ad sponsored like those services? And is mining data to target that advertising? I can't see any of that, but if you explicitly compare yourself to that sort of service without specifying otherwise it is an assumption many will make and won't be happy with.

Without some obvious sign of how the service intends to fund itself a lot of people will walk away assuming that it is advertising and/or mining (which they won't like for their invoices), that it will go away as soon as some unknown reserve runs out, or that it will suddenly become expensive once they are dependent on it. They won't believe "we never intend to charge" (they've heard that before and it hasn't always been true) and won't email you to ask (they just head off on their merry way).

dangerboysteve• 12 years ago

Those other services have people engaging with them many times per day thus the traffic. Invoicing is a task that you would do maybe once or twice per week ?

Also the live PDF view, which clever, is really also annoying as any typing or mouse hovering makes that area flash.

patio11• 12 years ago

My wife and I loved the logo. Nice sense of whimsy.

I'm not in the market for a new invoicing app, but if I were, the perceived sustainability of your business model is a dealbreaker for using you for it. My business deals with a 6 year audit window. (Technically speaking, multiple overlapping 6 year audit windows.) If your business fails, and I get audited, bad stuff happens. (e.g. The National Tax Agency might come to the conclusion "Mr. McKenzie, you claimed you had $5,000 withheld by clients in 2010 on your tax return for that fiscal year, but you seem to be unable to support that with original documentation. That's unfortunate, but we believe you're acting without malice, so in lieu of imprisoning you we'll just ask you to pay the $5,000 plus statutory interest of 8% a year."

Does this adequately explain why Free-as-in-Beer invoicing software doesn't exactly light a fire in my belly?

anderspetersson• 12 years ago

This looks really good!

You could charge for extra services, for example API access or "Sell my invoice"-integration.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

Facebook and Twitter have (m|b)illions of users and investment dollars behind them and thousands of employees. While I don't know a lot about your company, that in itself is a strong signal that you're not in the same boat.

I respect your desire to want to office the service for free, but I don't think your comparison will help to assuage anyone's fears of you disappearing.

qq66• 12 years ago

If you don't explain a business model (selling add-ons, advertising, freemium)... People will assume the most nefarious business model possible. I know how Facebook and Gmail and Dropbox make money. I'd need to know how you make money before I start using your product.

thejosh• 12 years ago

So since those services survive on mining users data, that's a great business chocie.

taf2• 12 years ago

Does it have an API? Also integration with Stripe?

InvoiceNinja5• 12 years ago

Our next build (very soon) will integrate with Stripe's API, yes!

medell2• 12 years ago

I love how you've taken the friction out of the signup process and the preview is great. However I can't use it as because I have the following text on my invoices:

1) In Canada you must include your GST# (looks like "55555 5555 RT001")

2) My business address, consultant contact name/email

3) Payment instructions (doesn't quite fit under terms, i.e. Checks payable to, or Wire Transfer / SWIFT code)

4) Ability to add additional billing information (i.e. one of the big companies requires department, a service agreement # and company contact under the "Bill To:")

5) Canadian dollar currency :)

InvoiceNinja5• 12 years ago

Great feedback! Can you email more details or to discuss about the Canadian requires and we'll implement in our next build! contact@invoiceninja.com

medell2• 12 years ago

Email sent!

dfrey2• 12 years ago

Out of curiosity, why did you choose to write a new web application in PHP?

I'm not a web developer, but everything I hear about PHP is bad.

xerophtye• 12 years ago

now i may be wrong, but isn't Facebook on PHP?

dfrey2• 12 years ago

If all the Facebook source code miraculously disappeared, do you think Facebook would rewrite Facebook in PHP?

pacofvf• 12 years ago

you should apply for a .ninja domain

hillelcoren6• 12 years ago

Many people have asked how this will be sustainable if it's free?

Enabling a ‘Pay Now’ button on an invoice requires configuring a payment provider. PayPal can be good when starting out but as you grow other providers may make more sense.

We will have affiliate links to these providers and will earn a small commission if people sign up.

The most expensive part of this sort of app is the development costs and I work for free. If we were hosting pictures or videos server costs could be an issue but invoice data is just text. I also have an amazing partner who is backing any financial concerns.

frade33• 12 years ago

I instantly shunned it because it is advertised as hosted invoicing CMS. I know you can install it yourself, and this is where you should focus on too, like fusioninvoice, which I am very comfortable with at this time.

No serious person is ever going to use your 'free-cloud-powered' service. As for paid cloud powered invoicing cms, freshbooks is a good choice, because I know they are not going to disappear overnight. But they are damn expensive for a small company therefore I use self-hosted fusion invoice cms.

Kluny• 12 years ago

I can't use this unless I know you have a sustainable business model. Maybe add that to your about page.

sailfast• 12 years ago

Looks great. Quick bug report - when working on an actual invoice I ran into issues on FireFox ESR 24. (I would imagine this happens any time a user restricts access to rendering PDFs on screen or in the browser as objects?) It pops up the "Open or Save" dialog each time a change is made and the object fails to load in the window below. Perhaps detecting the issue up front and then offering a "download" button when complete would be an alternative.

jweather• 12 years ago

Agreed... using external PDF viewers doesn't work with this site at all.

mholt• 12 years ago

Cool. Ever thought of verifying the addresses to make sure you're not missing apartment numbers and stuff? SmartyStreets would be happy to donate unlimited service to your startup for free for a year.

delwin2• 12 years ago

Really nice work! Blows my competing product out of the water, unfortunately.

delwin2• 12 years ago

http://www.ninjainvoice.com/

elwell• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm being picky, but 'ninja' in the name doesn't represent the service as serious which can connote lack of reliability, even subconsciously.

aytekin• 12 years ago

I like it. It is like one of those gawker headlines. You get curious and want to find out.

Invoice Ninja

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